Confidential weekly report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security examined by Reuters, found that the computers of the Securities and Exchange Commission had critical security flaws as of January 23, 2017. The findings of the DHS add to the concerns over the reliability of the SEC’s filing system “EDGAR” as earlier this week the Chairman of the securities regulator reported that this August the agency detected that hackers may have taken advantage of the 2016 cyber breach to use the leaked information for illicit trading.

The Homeland Security scanned the SEC’s computers for vulnerabilities along with the machines of other federal agencies, and reported that the SEC at the time of scanning had the fourth grade of the most ‘critical’ flaws in their system.

It remains unclear whether such flaws may be associated with the cyber-attack detected by the SEC. However, it is obvious that despite the allegations made by the regulator that they have fixed the bugs in their security in 2016, as of the year beginning vulnerabilities still persisted in their computers.

The report comes hot on the heels of the affray around the data leak from the servers of Equifax, which led to a series of lawsuits filed against the credit reporting agency across the nation. Two weeks ago reports exploded the mass media that data of about 143 million US consumers may have been compromised over the period of three months from May through July 2017.